


Keeping Score

by Viridian5



Series: Dark Angel [4]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Drama, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 1998-04-30
Updated: 1998-04-30
Packaged: 2017-10-02 08:19:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,269
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4394
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Viridian5/pseuds/Viridian5
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the early days of Mulder and Scully's partnership they investigate some shadowy doings that have a definite Conspiratorial bent...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Keeping Score

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for "Pilot."
> 
> There's an awful lot of time, more than a year, passing between "Pilot" and the next dated episode "Squeeze" ("Deep Throat" doesn't have a date). I had an urge to fill in some time, and this story came out from Scully's point of view (somewhere Te is screaming, but the end will redeem it for you, luv, I swear).

Alexandria, VA  
October 9, 1992  
10:00 p.m.

Agent Dana Scully sat through the second day and 18th coffee of another boring stakeout with a knot in her stomach. Unlike the other boring stakeouts, this one was unauthorized. She looked over at her partner, who watched the building across the street with far greater attention than she could currently manage. As much as she wanted to blame him for her presence here, she had to admit that he had asked her if she wanted to be excluded from this due to its unauthorized nature and she had told him no, that he could count her in. She knew what a refusal would mean to him.

With Mulder, you were either with him all the way or you were one of Them. She could tell that he still didn't entirely trust her yet, but at least he no longer saw her as one of Them. His lack of trust and his tests of her loyalty stung, but he distrusted and tested everyone. Paranoid to the core. She had seen enough vital evidence mysteriously disappear in the last few months to understand that his paranoia had some justification.

She couldn't decide whether he constantly broke the rules because he used to get away with it during his days as Violent Crimes' golden boy or out of some urge toward self-destruction. It bothered her, but she didn't see him changing, not that she wouldn't stop trying.

Someday she might even get him to call her "Dana." He had already seen her in her underwear. Usually that put her on a first-name basis with a person.

Dana opened the folder to look through the photographs and notes that accompanied this case. Actually, no one had opened a case on the killings, one of the many suspicious things that had grabbed Mulder's attention. 17 people, all members of certain departments in the FBI and CIA, murdered, and no one thought it should be investigated? At least not officially, Mulder had amended. Mulder thought that someone knew who the killer was and wanted the matter handled in-house. It had The Conspiracy's fingerprints all over it.

Dana still didn't believe in The Conspiracy, but she saw too many questionable things about the handling of this case to argue with his assertion that something should be done. She just didn't think she and Mulder should be doing it.

She flipped through the crime scene photos. The victims had been killed in a variety of ways. She saw gunshot wounds, slash wounds, broken necks, stab wounds, and garrote bruises with no preference to any single method. The execution of these deaths all suggested great--almost superhuman, though Dana scoffed at that term--strength and speed from the assailant, another factor that caught Mulder's attention when his source sent him the material. The killer had written a number in the victim's blood at each crime scene: 1 through 13 and then 1 through 4. The killer left something else as well.

"I'm still trying to figure out the bows," Dana said to Mulder. All the victims had a bow, the ones with the sticky backing people used in gift wrapping, affixed to their foreheads. She saw silver, pink, blue, purple, and black bows, again with no obvious preference given to any color.

"Maybe our killer is a disgruntled department store gift-wrapper? Maybe we have a killer with a sense of humor. It would be a nice change after all the humorless ones I tracked," he said.

"I would think that a killer with a sense of humor would be more dangerous," Dana said.

"Good point," he said and smiled. He did it so rarely, but his smiles blinded when they came. Dana wished Mulder would do it more often. "Have you noticed the other element the deaths have in common besides the bows and the numbers?" he asked.

"Aside from the strength and speed that you already mentioned, I don't see anything in common. The killer used a variety of means but didn't mind repeating them. The work doesn't look deliberately random... I don't see anything else."

His eyes took on a faraway look. "Except for the first death, they're all so efficient."

Dana thought back to the first death. The first victim had been shot repeatedly with his own gun 12 times. The killer shot out his knees, then his elbows, then his feet, then his hands and kept on going, having to reload at one point, before finishing the poor man off with a shot to the head.

Mulder continued, "For the other murders the killer matched method with location and circumstances and tried to make the death occur as quickly as possible. It looks familiar somehow but I don't know why, the answer hasn't come to me yet. The first death showed an incredible hatred but the others suggested a cold indifference. The targets may be important in some way but the deaths, not the people, mattered. That and the numbers suggest that the perpetrator is keeping some kind of tally, maybe a quota. I don't think the people guarding the man we all think is the next target are equipped to deal with what's coming for them."

"And we are?"

"More than people who don't believe in superhuman assassins."

Dana didn't argue. Her last attempt to dissuade him from this hadn't done anything more than amuse him. She just hoped something would happen soon.

An hour later Mulder moved forward in his seat to stare more intently at the building. "Something's going on. Wait... Scully, call for backup! Someone set off a gas grenade in there." He opened the driver's side door.

Dana saw some of the gas escaping from an open window too now. As she started dialing her cell phone, she asked, "Where are you going?"

"Where do you think?" He ran to the building. "It's a knockout gas, one of the non-lethal varieties," he shouted to her before he put a handkerchief over his nose and mouth and dashed in.

As Dana finished dialing, she mentally added another tally to the "self-destructive" side of her Mulder ledger and hoped that a team wouldn't have to pull him out.

Twenty minutes later he fell out the door and collapsed in a heap on the sidewalk. As Dana helped drag him to the car, he gasped, "I'm so glad they were on the second floor." When she got him onto the passenger seat he began to cough.

"Why the hell did you do something so stupid?" Dana yelled.

Mulder looked nonplussed then started to smile. "Scully, I didn't know you cared. I don't expect this crime scene to stick around. The others got erased. I expect a fixer crew to show up any moment now. Could you drive us somewhere that would keep us out of sight but still let us watch?" To Dana's disgust, he used his entreating puppy look. To her further disgust, it worked.

Dana found them a secluded spot to wait in. They didn't wait long. Five cars drove up with more people in them than she expected. The men put on masks and entered the building.

"I wonder what story they'll hand out to the media?" Mulder asked. "The killer left everyone but the target alive. With luck, the crew going in will leave them that way." He took out his camera.

"You hardly had any time to check out the crime scene. You ran in there for almost nothing."

"Not quite. The perpetrator left a note pinned to one of the target's guardians, and I memorized it. It read: 'It's a good thing for you I'm not greedy. What, you thought you had a chance in hell of stopping me? You should have known better than these innocents that it would be useless. I took my intended mark. You can wait till next year. P.S.: Mr. Morley, you can wait your turn too. I hope you enjoy wondering.' No signature. I _knew_ it was an anniversary of some sort." Dana watched in wonderment as revelation visibly hit him. A light seemed to turn on in his eyes. "I think I have an idea of where we should go next."

******************************************************  
_"Light a candle,  
Lay flowers at the door  
For those who're left behind  
And the ones who've gone before"_  
\-- "Out of My Mind" by Duran Duran  
\--------------------------------------------------------

Blooming Grove, PA  
October 10, 1992  
11:30 p.m.

Standing among the bright fallen leaves, a blond woman all in black lit a second white candle and placed it next to the first one on a cleaned-off boulder. The flames danced in the cold night breeze.

She leaned back and smiled. "See, I didn't forget. How could I forget either of you? I nailed the same number that killed you with one more each to grow on. I didn't count the werewolf, Joe, because that wouldn't be fair; it had nothing to do with your murder. I may escalate by one more each every year, but I still have a year to decide.

"That's in addition to all the agents who came after me that I killed. I may one day run out of agents to kill. Now _there's_ a concept to wrap your mind around. I guess I could always branch out into the NSA and DoD. That housecleaning could keep me going for years.

"I'm doing well as a bounty hunter/paranormal investigator, Joe. Self-employment suits me. Thanks for the money you left me. A girl could always use an extra $50,000. You were my partner, my friend, my father, and my straight man, and I'll never be able to replace you. I hope you liked the bows.

"Every time I get an odd thought, and you know I get those a lot, I still turn to tell you about it and you're not there. Here's one: babies don't seem quite the same species as the rest of us. It's like humans and apes. I mean, babies have those giant heads, and sometimes you look into their eyes and you can tell no one's home. Babies. Spooky. So my topic for discussion is Babies: Human Offspring or Alien Bugging Devices?" She stepped back and opened her arms into a ta-da! stance. "I can feel you giving me that look, Joe.

"Podeszwa, I thought of doing your memorial in the hospital you died in but decided against it. Not that I _couldn't_ do it if I really wanted to, but it raises the risk of somebody innocent getting hurt. I'm still sorry I couldn't get there in time to help and save you, but you did manage to kill three of them even with your guts hanging out. I hunted down the last one.

"I miss you both." She shivered and pulled her battered and taped-up black leather jacket, the one with the "Eldritch" name tape on it, closer around her. As Claudia Konanykhine, as with Danielle Morley before her, she didn't get to dress like this very often.

A sudden rustling in the underbrush from the distance got her attention. She climbed a nearby tree and waited, gun in hand, for whoever arrived.

"The M.E. determined the time of death of the first round of bodies to be from 11:00 p.m. to 1 a.m. If we wait, we might see something. This is the clearing, Scully, and look there!" Mulder sounded very excited as he pointed to the candles. Not even tripping over a loose rock hidden by the fallen leaves dimmed his enthusiasm.

Scully gave him a dirty look. "You're going to tell me about this. _All_ about this."

They searched the ground for two hours and even looked up at the trees, but Claudia's tree still had enough leaf cover remaining to hide her. Even Mulder eventually gave up. As they left, Claudia saluted him and whispered, "Open an X-File on yourself, Mulder." She smirked. "It looks like I'll be using the hospital next year. Not even you will figure that one out, you son of a bitch." When she knew they were gone, she leapt down and snuffed out the candles.

******************************************************  
J. Edgar Hoover Building  
Washington, D.C.  
October 11, 1992  
11:30 p.m.

No matter how long he sat and how many cigarettes he smoked, the words on the note stayed the same. _Her_ note. She was out there, and she wanted him to know that she still thought of him. Now he had something beside his ulcer to remind him of her. This note and rumblings from the Consortium, angry that one of his tools had slipped from his hand to plague them all.

She'd learned her lessons well. She wanted him to wonder when his time will come; she wanted him to think about hastening it himself.

That would never happen. Too many people would have to die first.

But sometimes he thought of the gun in his holster with such longing...

He'd forfeited Alice Pryor and set her against him while following the Consortium's directive requiring Fox Mulder to work the X-Files. He started to smile darkly. It was time to start putting Fox to work.

### End

**AUTHOR'S NOTE:** Northeastern Pennsylvania has beautiful colors in  
autumn. Also, you should never use an open flame in the woods;  
keep it within a ring of stones or on a cleared-off boulder. Only  
you can prevent forest fires!

I know the song lyrics don't fit the time period, but they inspired  
the story, so there _*big raspberry*_.

Another Manic!Viridian production.  
(Just seeing if anyone is paying attention)


End file.
